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It would take more than three hours to complete the seven-mile stretch from Dorking to Reigate, and a Blitz spirit broke out among us trapped drivers.

I shared a packet of Jaffa Cakes with a family in the car behind; people swapped their travel horror stories; and one man stalked off to try to find out what was causing the interminable hold-up.

For this was the most frustrating thing about it all. Yes, a bit of snow had fallen and yes, the road was icy in places, but with a little extra care, driving should have been perfectly possible; and in a story repeated up and down the country, no one seems to be able explain why it wasn’t.

When I asked Surrey County Council, they insisted the A25 had been gritted twice that day (if so, I certainly didn’t feel the crunch beneath my wheels) and disruption was inevitable in such conditions.

Freezing: Revellers are not daunted by the severe temperatures in Newcastle city centre

At least, though, they didn’t say it had snowed at the wrong time of day, as I was told by the spokesman for Croydon.

‘It was the timing of the snow, coming in peak rush-hour – normally it comes at night,’ she said, when asked why the entire town had been gridlocked again on Tuesday, just as it was last Christmas.

As weather expert Philip Eden says, snow doesn’t fall more frequently after dark, any more than trains can be cancelled because the snowflakes are of ‘the wrong type’ – the famously lame excuse trotted out by one British Rail executive.

Whiling away the long hours in my steamed-up Toyota on Tuesday night, I thought of the many countries I have visited on foreign reporting assignments with far harsher climates than ours, and wondered why they never have these problems.

When it snows in New York, the roads are carpeted by feet of the stuff, not a slushy veneer, yet the Cadillacs glide freely along Madison Avenue all winter long.

Snowploughs are out all night every night clearing everything in their path. The same goes for Stockholm and Toronto.

From the hill near my house, I can see the runways of Gatwick Airport which yesterday – like Edinburgh’s – were eerily empty.

They may have been snowbound yet I once landed smoothly at Gander, Newfoundland, in an Arctic blizzard with the mercury at 30 below.

No one stays off work in those countries because they can’t make it
into the office; no one shivers all night in a shut-down railway
station; the children aren’t given the day off school (like the pupils
my daughter teaches yesterday) because health and safety regulations
deem icy playgrounds and snowballing too dangerous.

In these truly
cold nations, the neurotic helplessness that paralyses Britain the
moment a light dusting of snow falls is making us a laughing stock.

‘If
we can give Gatwick any advice, please call,’ said the duty airport
officer in Yakutsk, the Siberian diamond capital, where yesterday the
temperature plunged to a bone-cracking -46C.

His mirth was shared
by a railway track cleaner in Novosibirsk. ‘For us, winter comes every
year,’ he said with heavy irony as he hacked ice so the Trans-Siberian
express could leave on schedule.

In such places, when the snow
falls life simply goes on as normal. How do they do it? Big surprise –
since they know full well it will come, they prepare.

Each October
in Switzerland, everyone replaces summer tyres with thick-tread winter
ones or covers them in chains.

A law in Austria holds all
householders legally responsible for sweeping the pavement in front of
their home. Jobless people are also paid 20 euros to sweep and shovel
snow off the roads.

Stranded: Duty officer at the airport in Yukutsk, the Siberian diamond capital offered to give officials at Gatwick some advice is they'd care to give him a call

One accepts that winter snow is the norm in these countries, but even in Germany – where the weather is not that much different to Britain’s – they are managing the current cold snap admirably.

According to a friend in Berlin, the trains are running, the schools are open and – in contrast with the horrendous scenes on the M25, where hundreds of lorry drivers slept in their cabs on Tuesday night – the autobahns are clear.

Last winter, when the biggest chill for 31 years brought Britain shuddering to a halt for more than a week, we were assured lessons would be learned and there would be no repeat. Some promise.

It isn’t just our chaotic disorganisation that brings Britain grinding to a halt when it snows – it is also our state of mind.When I was a boy in the Sixties and the car wouldn’t start or the bus didn’t come, we walked to school.

And we were desperately keen to get there to skate on the giant slide we’d made in the quad.

Our parents were reluctant to skip work because in those days it usually meant being docked a day’s pay. If we were cold, we put on an extra jumper and ran around more.

According to Professor Alexander Gardner, a psychologist who contributed to the BBC programme Weather and Mood and grew up in the war years, today’s over-cautious attitude is symptomatic of an unhealthy social shift.

‘If you are constantly looking out for something to go wrong, that leads to phobias, panic and obsession,’ he says, recalling how he tramped to school in his wellingtons on snowy days – unaccompanied – at the age of four.

‘It’s a cultural thing – people are much more protective these days and it can go over the top. I remember in 1963, my wife went sledging the day before she gave birth to our son. It was perfectly safe and she had fun but not many women would do that now.’

Indeed they wouldn’t.

Our daughter’s usual 50-minute journey home took eight hours, our son’s 20-minute drive took an hour and a half.

As for me, after seething at the wheel for eight hours, I skidded on our lane – ungritted, naturally – and ended up in a bush, where the car remains.